Network providers often provide network services to clients where the services are defined through contract negotiations. Furthermore, the contracts may define performance guarantees prior to deployment of the services or sites. Specifically, the Service Level Agreements (SLA) define the minimum levels of quality or availability of a service and a corresponding penalty schedule for violation of these minimum requirements.
When a standard SLA is absent, the SLA is usually drafted in an expedited manner to provide services to the client in a timely fashion. When a standard SLA exists, a client may request the SLA to be updated or altered to reflect stricter requirements. In either scenario, only a small set of statistics will be known. Thus, the service provider is unable to collect an exhaustive long-term set of measurements that would provide detailed data for the modeling of quantities such as long-term site availability or latency. Even when measurements may be gathered, there may be a deficiency that denies the user from modeling. One result is the penalty schedule incorporated in the SLA may create heavy losses to the service provider.